Category: aging

While I have always been a highly introspective person, I never thought my introspection would grow more prominently into old age. I assumed (never assume) that by now – at 64 – I would have it all figured out and there would be less of a need to be looking inward and more of a desire to increasingly play cards with other people near or in retirement. Boy was I wrong!

If you estimate you will inhabit the Earth until you reach into your ninetieth year, you can use an obvious baseball metaphor to represent your aging life. At 60 you are in the sixth inning of a nine-inning game, and you are – congratulations – manager of the home team. With 60 being the first decade of the final third of the game, reaching that milestone, in my opinion, means you can officially be called “old.”

As I push myself through this study on aging, I’ve arrived at a point of having to more thoroughly review the research and attempt to synthesize the most salient nuggets of information I have thus far highlighted either electronically on my Kindle, or by underlining in pen, or by swiping across with various-colored highlighters in the many hard-cover and paperback books I own.

As a home-office-based freelance writer, long periods of solitude spent in deep work comes with the territory. There are times when I will not have a conversation with anyone other than my wife for an entire week.

As a work-for-hire freelance writer, I have always believed that the deliberate practice of my work over the years/decades would give me some small semblance of financial success and a more continuous stream of reliable, paid work by this stage of life in my early sixties.

The so-called “longevity revolution” drives the next phases of Baby Boomer life, as they reach into their elder years. In short, we are still around and will stay around much longer than our predecessor generations. Plus, there are a lot of us, some 78 to 80 million by most estimates.